Professional Summary

Platform Engineer / Site Reliability Engineer with extensive experience optimizing performance-critical applications and implementing infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD pipelines. Motivated by developing intuitive abstractions that allow developers to work effectively with complex systems.

Languages and technologies

• Languages: Ruby, Go, Bash, Lua (for Redis and nginx), SQL, C, JavaScript (Node.js), Python
• Distributed Systems & Databases: PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, S3, DynamoDB
• DevOps: AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, Terraform, Kustomize

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Work Experience

DevOps Consultant

Freelance (Remote)

October 2023 - Present

• Refactored an untested and brittle C/Ruby integration based on SWIG, enabling Ruby developers to make API changes without C knowledge while maintaining runtime safety and performance
• Resolved a catastrophic outage by identifying and resolving virtual machine I/O bottlenecks, optimizing workload distribution across virtual block devices to account for network latency overhead
• Authored detailed runbooks and automated workflows to ensure long-term system resiliency

Staff Engineer

Kajabi (Remote)

July 2021 - July 2023

• Provided technical leadership for 30+ staff across Production Engineering, UX, Quality Engineering, and Security & Risk
• Guided 9 cross-functional teams in data systems design and implementation, maintainable abstractions, and performance
• Mentored engineers in application performance and designing resilient interfaces to distributed systems like Kafka and DynamoDB
• Designed content-addressable storage for rendering end user templates, significantly reducing memory usage across processes

Staff Production Engineer

Kajabi (Remote)

December 2020 - July 2021

• Rebuilt the CI/CD pipeline for a large Rails application using Docker and BuildKit, reducing median build time from 45 to 9 minutes through careful optimization of layer caching, dependency caching, conditional step execution, and parallel execution and as a side effect, allowed builds to be run locally with fully reproducible build artifacts.
• Optimized Aurora PostgreSQL to handle 50,000 QPS during peak loads through configuration tuning and query optimization
• Implemented database performance isolation by decoupling workloads with a foreign data wrapper (FDW), preserving functionality while preventing system-wide slowdowns

Senior Production Engineer (Tech Lead)

Kajabi (Remote)

November 2019 - December 2020

• Defined the hiring and onboarding processes for the Production Engineering team and grew the team from 2 to 7 engineers while managing 2 full time contractors.
• Designed and executed a near-zero downtime migration of a Heroku PostgreSQL database to AWS Aurora PostgreSQL, leveraging kernel tuning and cache warming to reduce customer impact and proactive testing and rollback planning to ensure resilience.
• Developed infrastructure-as-code, migration automations, and provided technical leadership to the Production Engineering team and the 6 product development teams for migrating application compute workloads from Heroku to AWS EKS.
• Implemented libraries and services in Ruby, primarily around resilience in the face of partial system failure

Senior Software Consultant

Subcontractor for Test Double (Remote)

May 2019 - November 2019

• Worked on the Ruby VM (i.e. “MRI”) in C to prototype the reliability and performance impact of interning all string literals.
• Diagnosed and fixed memory problems in a Go service that used cgo to integrate with a Rust library that itself integrated with a C++ library, reducing memory usage of ~10k server instances by ~250MB each, significantly decreasing resource utilization across a Kubernetes cluster